Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Science Education Gets Real at Sanborn Regional

"Science is dirty!" "It’s too hard!"
"We don't have the tools we need!" Sound familiar? These were a few
of the comments by sophomores from Sanborn Regional High School working at
local Powwow Pond as part of an intense semester long project.

Sarah Sallade, a 10th grade Life Science teacher
at Sanborn, says that such complaints naturally arise when students experience
what it's like to be out in the field collecting their own data – sans the
spoon feeding of information they are accustomed to. “In real life, doing
research is messy, you don't always have all of the information or funding for
the most advanced resources, and sometimes you have to improvise,” says
Sallade, who holds master’s degrees in both natural resources and education
from UNH. “This project is interesting because it's a different approach,"
says Sallade.

And she would know. Her master's research involved carbon
cycling of forests of the northeastern U.S. From 2006-2012, Sarah primarily
worked to translate terrestrial carbon cycle research into hands-on educational
and student research activities for K-12 classrooms. In collaboration with the
international Global Learning and Observations to Benefit
the Environment (GLOBE) education program, she traveled locally and globally to
train teachers and teacher-trainers on the Carbon Cycle project materials. The Globe Carbon Cycle project at UNH
is funded by NASA and
NSF to develop hands-on, primary and secondary school-based science
activities. She
is now a practicing GLOBE teacher at Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston,
NH.

The ecology project at Powwow Pond focused on the impaired
and nutrient overloaded body of water in Kingston. It combined three sophomore
classes: Biology, Government and Economics, and English. Students worked with
property owners, the Powwow Pond Council (PPC), and the Kingston Conservation
Commission (KCC) to study the different laws and regulations that govern
environmental protection. They also wrote educational flyers on topics such as
fertilizer usage and impacts of storm water.

“It gets our students out in the community and working on a
project that impacts them or their neighbors," observes Sanborn Regional
High School Principal Brian Stack. And the project involved much more than
that. It started with a dedicated group of teachers who worked as a team in
collaboration with the KCC and the PPC to design, coordinate and map out the
semester-long activities that would result in a set of solutions the students
could implement to help the pond.

Evelyn Nathan of KCC and Diane Coll of PPC started by
gaining permission for 180 students to access several private properties around
the lake where the students took measurements and samples of soil and water,
drew diagrams and photo documented the area. Teachers then recruited local
experts to come to the school and present. Suzanne Petersen, the Lamprey River
Advisory Committee outreach coordinator, worked with the Department of
Environmental Services watershed model in the biology lab: affording students
the chance to explore how the land surrounding streams, rivers and lakes acts
as a drainage basin or watershed. Michelle Daley, a research scientist from the
Department of Natural Resources at UNH, met with students and talked about her
career as a scientist studying water quality and the differences between point
and non-point source pollution.

Sallade says bridging the gap between the scientific
community and the K-12 education community is important because the general
public often misunderstands science as a discipline. “Many people do not
understand that what we know to be true today is based upon multiple lines of
evidence that have been peer reviewed and confirmed by many in the scientific
community,” says Sallade. While sometimes there are major shifts in scientific
thinking, generally science theories build slowly over time as we gather more
evidence. “It’s critically important that this process and understanding of
science not only be taught to students but also experienced by them so when
they become voting citizens they are able to make informed decisions.”

The culmination of the project ended back at Powwow Pond
where students spent a day spread out over five properties, where they built
infiltration trenches, rain gardens and vegetative buffers that would soak up
the water and pollutants and lessen the impact of excess nutrients during
future storms and floods.

When asked what she was working on, sophomore Gillian Crane
says, "We're filling these trenches with gravel and they are going to act
as filters for all the stuff that runs off the road, instead of it going
directly into the pond."

Evelyn Nathan, chair of the Conservation Commission in
Kingston, put the matter frankly: "We know there is a problem with the
pond. One of our goals is to try and use more organic solutions and come at
this from a different angle. The students are part of that effort and they are
doing an awesome job!"